A Product Review

Car Reliability Ratings For 2009

most-reliable-car
Every year, JD Powers rates the reliability of new automobiles based on 3-year poll results of original car owners. Reliability is ranked on around 200 or so mechanical criteria, then grouped in 5 different categories:

  1. Overall Reliability
  2. Powertrain
  3. Body and Interior
  4. Features and Accessories

We should remember that Used Car Ratings might look completely different than New Car Ratings. The New Cars judged in these reliability ratings are three years old, meaning that none of them go beyond the age of a 2006 model. There is a tremendous amount of data to gather in order to derive a useful used car reliability ratings chart. It would be interesting to see the 20-year ratings on cars and which of them rank the best for longevity and lowest-maintenance life span.

While I certainly appreciate the tremendous effort and research JD Powers does in getting these useful new car ratings together, I wish they would go into a bit more detail. I am sure they have enough data to break these rankings down into even more meaningful specifics as it pertains to new car reliability. As for the auto rating system, wouldn't it be much more interesting to see 100-point spans over the vague 5-Star ratings they use? I am sure they have the data on these new cars - it's just a matter of sharing it in their charts. Since I like numbers and 100-point ratings systems, PRR has decided to extrapolate the numbers and come up with a rough average, using the 100-point average scale. The result is the PRR Rating shown in the table below.

Car Reliability

New Car Ratings

Make Overall Powertrain Body & Int. Features & Acc. PRR Rating
1 Buick 100 100 80 100 93.33
Toyota 100 100 80 100 93.33
2 Jaguar 100 100 100 60 86.67
Lexus 100 100 100 60 86.67
Mercury 100 80 80 100 86.67
3 Infiniti 80 100 80 60 80.00
Cadillac 80 60 80 100 80.00
Honda 80 80 60 100 80.00
4 Acura 80 100 60 60 73.33
Lincoln 80 80 80 60 73.33
Porche 80 80 80 60 73.33
5 Audi 60 60 80 60 66.67
Ford 60 60 60 80 66.67
Hyundai 60 80 60 60 66.67
Subaru 60 80 60 60 66.67
Chrysler 60 60 80 60 66.67
BMW 60 80 60 60 66.67
6 GMC 60 60 60 60 60.00
Mercedes Benz 60 60 80 40 60.00
Chevrolet 60 60 60 60 60.00
7 Mitsubishi 60 40 60 60 53.33
Volvo 60 60 60 40 53.33
Nissan 40 40 60 60 53.33
Dodge 40 40 60 60 53.33
Mini 40 40 60 60 53.33
Saab 40 60 40 60 53.33
8 Saturn 40 60 40 40 46.67
Jeep 40 40 60 40 46.67
Pontiac 40 40 40 60 46.67
Scion 40 60 40 40 46.67
Mazda 40 40 60 40 46.67
Land Rover 40 40 40 60 46.67
Volkswagen 40 60 40 40 46.67
9 Kia 40 40 40 40 40.00
Hummer 40 40 40 40 40.00
Isuzu 40 40 40 40 40.00
Suzuki 40 40 40 40 40.00
10
Excellent
Very Good
Good
Fair
Poor
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Posted under Autos, Personal Care

This post was written by Rob on March 19, 2009

Tags: , ,

2 Comments so far

  1. Rob April 16, 2009 9:41 pm

    Buick number one? What a world.

  2. Rob January 3, 2010 9:31 pm

    Don’t be surprised to see even more U.S Cars improve in the reliability department.

    Stay tuned for the 2010 Car Reliability Ratings. They’ll be out soon.

    Rob

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